


Confessional

by StormDancer



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene, coming clean about the danse macabre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-17
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2019-02-03 11:26:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12747378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StormDancer/pseuds/StormDancer
Summary: Betty is done playing someone else's game.(The missing scene in 2.06)





	Confessional

**Author's Note:**

> I'm new to the fandom, so I have no idea how this corresponds to fanon or even canon; I just know that this scene was missing and I was sad about that so I filled it in. Enjoy!

“Betty.”

He wasn’t expecting her, that much is clear. Betty supposes that makes sense; she hasn’t exactly been trying to be found, recently. And before that—well, even before the Black Hood, she’d tried to respect Jughead’s space, let him find his way on his own. And it had meant not a lot of showing up unannounced on either end.

But she’s done with that. Done with playing other people’s games, even the games of people she loves. So she’s at the trailer door, ready to lay her heart on the line.  

“Can I come in?” she asks. She tries to pitch it low and gentle, to make it clear that he has a choice. That choice, of course, being whether they have this conversation outside or not. But she needs to say this. He deserves to hear it.

For a long moment, she thinks he’s going to say no. She might deserve it. Maybe Toni’s in there. Maybe the Serpents. There’s a lot about Jughead’s life she doesn’t know right now. And not all of that’s on her.

“Yeah,” he agrees at last, on a sigh, and steps aside.

She tries not to make it obvious that she’s taking in the space as she walks in. It’s cleaner than it was when FP was living here alone, less clean than when she’d been in and out. Someone’s been in the kitchen recently, cooking. She’s pretty sure it wasn’t Jughead.

But that doesn’t matter. She repeats that to herself. She—she wants to walk it back now, but she’d made her choice, and Jughead had a right to live with it. He did. If it was with Toni—if he didn’t want her to walk it back—she swallows. She can deal with it.

“Looking for a stash of jingle jangle?” Jughead asks, sharp. He’s leaning against a wall, his arms crossed across his chest. Closed off body language, a voice that sounds like her mother says in her head. He always looks good, but he doesn’t look particularly well. There are still cuts and bruises healing on his face, some that look even worse than they did when she saw him a day ago at the race. She hopes he’s been taking care of them. Hopes that—hopes that someone has.

“No, Juggie. Of course not.” She does know better than that. Jughead _wouldn’t_. He said he wouldn’t join the serpents, and that’s one thing, but Jughead won’t even drink after seeing his dad. He wouldn’t. And he wouldn’t deal. These are things she’s sure of.

“Out with it, then, Betty. Why are you here?” His eyes narrow, and his shoulders tense. Once, she would have gone to him, eased the tension from his shoulders with a touch. Now, she curls her hands into fists at her side. She has to say it. Has to.

Jughead glances at her fists, then back to her face. She wonders what he’s thinking. “Are you going to woman up and tell me in person, this time? Is that what this is?”

“No.” She’s faced down a serial killer. This shouldn’t be harder. But seeing Jughead’s blank face—the face he makes when he wants to shut everyone out—it is. Everything in her hurts. She wishes it could be a month ago, the two of them curled up together on the couch with their respective books. “I—I told you, there’s an explanation. It’s not a sane explanation, but it’s something.”

“I think it’s pretty sane.” Jughead bit back. “Like Archie said. You saw where I was going, and you decided that you didn’t want to get pulled down with me. That you were too good for this. You didn’t want anything to do with me.”

His voice has the lilt that means he’s quoting. She’s desperately afraid it’s Archie. She’s almost more afraid it isn’t. But she really needs to talk to Archie and ask him just what he thinks constitutes the least painful way to do things.  

“No.”

“No?” Jughead’s eyebrows go up. “You mean you approve? Of the Serpents?”

“You know I don’t.” She’s not going to lie about that. “But—” No, she can say this. “And I wish you’d told me. But—I told you I’d support you.”

“Riding a motorcycle. Not joining a gang.”

“It’s not—that’s not the point!” She plants her feet, lifts her chin. “It wasn’t because of that, anyway.”

“Oh? Then what?” He’s trying to sound nonchalant, but Betty knows him better than that. Knows that desperation in his eyes. She wonders if it’s him wanting an explanation that makes sense, or wanting one that doesn’t, so he can dismiss her and go back to the Serpents and Toni and the life he’s making here.

It doesn’t matter. She’s telling the truth. And then if he wants her to go—if she’s wrong about the way he looked at her in the garage, with so much hurt; if she’s wrong about the smile he’d had when she’d told him she still loved him—then she’ll go. She has Veronica back, she has Archie, she has Kevin. She even has Cheryl, sort of. She’ll hunt down the Black Hood and make him pay for what he did.

“You know the letter, from the Black Hood? That he’d written to me?”

“Yeah.” Jughead’s alert now. The way he is when he scents a clue and doesn’t want to show it. She’d fallen in love with that alertness.

“Well, a little while after that, he—” she gulps air, but she can do this. She doesn’t know why it’s so hard. It wasn’t her fault. “He started calling me.”

“What!” It bursts out of Jughead loud enough that she flinches, and he surges upright, his hands dropping to his side, like he’s going to go do—something. “Betty, what the hell?” He crosses to her in three long strides, grabs her shoulders. Not rough, because Jughead is never rough with her, always so careful, but forceful enough that she jerks with it. “Are you in danger?”

“No.” She takes a breath, but he’s staring down at her, intense and worried and afraid and so brave, so ready to take on the world for her. “But you might be.”

It all spills out of her then—the calls and Veronica and Archie and Nick St. Clair and the Sugarman and everything she did and didn’t do and why. She can feel herself tearing up as she talks, tries to keep them from falling. She doesn’t want him to see that—doesn’t want him to know. That’s not what this is. Jughead’s hands tighten on her shoulders as she talks. When she gets to the part about him—to why—he lets go, takes a step back. His face is blank again, but there’s almost too much happening behind his eyes for her to figure out what’s going on.

Finally, she gets to what she told the Black Hood—to her threats, to what she’s going to do—and there’s nothing more to say.

Jughead doesn’t say anything, for a long minute. There’s a rattle of metal, and Betty jumps, spooked, still looking for the gun and the hood—but then a dog comes running up, an adorable little thing who noses at Jughead’s leg. Jughead shushes him absently, not looking away from Betty. She wonders where he came from, but now’s not the time to ask.

“And you’re safe now?” Jughead asks, at last. “I’m safe?”

“I don’t know, honestly.” Betty’s gone around and around on this. But she just—doesn’t know. Can’t know. “But I’m done playing his game. I won’t let him do this to me. To us.”

“You did, though.” Jughead points out, the words each falling like ice. “You sent Archie to break up with me. _Archie_.”

“I didn’t think I could do it, if it were me.” Betty knows what she has to say next. It’ll hurt, but she has to do it. She can do it. She’s not weak. “But I did. And I—I understand if you would rather it stay that way. If things have changed for you.”

“Changed?” Jughead echoes. It has the wryly bitter sound of someone who’s thought that word a lot. “For me?”

“I saw you with Toni, at Pop’s.” Betty forces it out. “She’s—she gets you, and this world, and she seems smart and nice. If you’d rather—” 

“I kissed her.” Betty thinks Jughead means it to hurt. Even if he didn’t, it still does. She’d known, even before all this. She’d seen them getting closer, and she trusted Jughead, but she also knew that Toni could give him things she couldn’t. How much easier it would be, with Toni. She looks down at her feet, so Jughead won’t see the tears at the corner of her eyes.

“Okay. Well. I’ll just—”

“Apparently, she’s no one’s second choice. And I’m still in love with you.”

“What?”

“God, Betty.” Jughead takes another step forward, so she has to tilt her head back to look at him. She’s close enough to kiss him, if she thought he’d welcome it, which she’s not sure. “Do you know how much it hurt?”

She nods. She does. Oh, does she. “I—you dumped me. Archie said you’d wanted to dump me for weeks.”

“He said what?” she snaps. She hadn’t told him to say _that_. “And you believed him?”

Jughead shrugs. It’s a surprisingly boyish motion, for someone who’s always seemed far more grown up than any of the rest of them. “Romeo and Juliet doesn’t end happily. And he said—he was right—it hadn’t been great. You hadn’t even told me about the letter. I couldn’t blame you for wanting out.”

“I didn’t want _out_.” Betty’s hands are on her hips now, and she can feel her eyes narrowing. “Yeah, things were hard, because you were at a different school and I had a serial killer talking to me and this town is a mess! That doesn’t mean I want out.”

“You don’t?” Though his face is blank, she can still hear the hope in his voice—it sounds like _also_ , it sounds like _Juliet_ , it sounds like _let’s run away_. “Even with my less than savory associations? With what your mom will say?”

 Betty sets her shoulders, lifts her chin. She knows what he’s trying to do. But she is playing her own game now, and he is not an acceptable loss. “Not unless you want me to leave.”

“Betty,” he breathes, then he takes another step closer. Their toes are nearly touching now. His hand is on her shoulder, her neck, her cheek. His thumbs brush over her cheeks, wiping away the tears.

“I love you,” she says, as sure as she had been the first time in this trailer, and he swallows the last word with a kiss she’s been aching for for days.

It’s not perfect, she knows. She still hurt him. He’s still the Serpent prince and she’s the North Side princess in a town on the brink of war. There’s still all the secrets they kept from each other, and why.

But right now Jughead is kissing her and his hands are stroking up her sides like he can’t believe he gets to touch her, and his mouth feel so good on hers after so long, and she wants more, wants all of him, wants to cleanse herself of all the poison Black Hood ever whispered in her phone with Jughead’s harsh breaths and the “I love you, god, Betty, don’t ever—” he’s murmuring in her ear.

It’s not over. But for the first time in weeks, she feels like she’s going to win.

**Author's Note:**

> Liked it? Want to talk about it, or Riverdale, or anything? Comment or come chat on [ tumblr!](http://hurricanedancer.tumblr.com/)


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